According to a survey published by Osterman Research Inc. in June-July 2009, using a sample of large organisations (over 500 employees and $5 million dollar revenue), 82% of employees resort to using personal email accounts when sending large files.  This tactic is employed by many to evade the email server attachment limits imposed by IT departments.

Considering 20% of the organisations surveyed send in excess of 500 files a week, this is a seriously disturbing statistic when you take into account the ramifications of using standard email for file transfer.  The most frustrating aspect of this predicament, is that many IT professionals are fully aware of the risks associated with this method of file transfer in particular e.g…

•    Compromised security and non-compliance
•    Lack of tracking, logging and auditing
•    The absence of visibility and monitoring

…and consequently, have introduced strategies and procedures to combat the use of unsolicited file transfer methods. The problem is employees will continue to violate security and procedural policies if they aren’t provided with a comparable, alternative solution that offers the same, simple functionality as their email client.

The results also revealed that 55% of the organisations surveyed had seen a 20% increase in ad hoc file transfer activity during June-July 2009 – the largest growth across all of the business file transfer ‘requirements’.  Evidently, employees have an increasing need to send large files on an ad hoc basis, largely due to the dramatic increase in file size over recent years.

So the moral of this story is, if you want your employees to adhere to company procedural policies when sending large files on an ad hoc basis, IT departments need to provide them with an adequate alternative to their email server!

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As I’m sure (or hope) you may have spotted in the news, we have recently added Biscom’s secure, Ad Hoc file transfer solution to our ever expanding product portfolio – another milestone in Pro2col’s endeavor to provide our customers with a wide range of secure, large file transfer solutions to meet their every need.

During our time in the file transfer industry we have spoken to lots of organisations across different industry sectors with a requirement to send large files on an Ad Hoc (or one-off) basis, a need that had been overlooked in the development of many secure file transfer solutions.  Ad Hoc file transfer solutions come into their own on the occasions that you really need to send a large file quickly and simply without the worry or expense of having to involve IT administrators to create or manage end-user accounts.  They will literally allow you to send the file in the same way you would when using an email attachment, minus the problems experienced when using a traditional mail server!

We wanted to take this opportunity to invite all of our readers to a special webinar being held on Thursday 29th October at 2pm (GMT).  Here you will be given the chance to see exactly how the solution works and to ask any questions relating to the Biscom Delivery Server, Ad Hoc file transfer or just secure file transfer in general!

To find our more about exactly what will be covered during the 1 hour webinar, please visit the webinar section of the Pro2col website.

If you are interested in attending please

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Recently we seem to be getting quite a few enquiries from companies experiencing difficulties with high latency during the file transfer process.  It appears to be a wide spread issue, affecting businesses in a climate where everybody needs to get ahead of the game.  Companies want – no need – their files right here, right now!!!

For those of us unfamiliar with the term, latency is an expression for the period of time taken to send a data packet from a source to the intended destination.  The higher the latency, the slower the data transmission.  This incorporates all elements involved in the file sending process – including encoding, transmission, and decoding.

There are certain delivery protocols (such as FTP) that are particularly susceptible to latency.  This is because when sending packets of data to a remote site, the sending site waits for an acknowledgment that the packet has been received before sending the next one.  This makes the problem extremely time consuming in the event of high latency.  In extreme cases of latency, the time that it takes for the delivery of data and then the reply, can result in the data throughput levels dropping to a significantly low level, rendering the solution useless.

So, what can we do about it?  There are several ways to combat this problem – one being to utilise a multi-threaded TCP protocol – working in the same manner as above ONLY multiple packet transfer requests are made at any one time, increasing the throughput.  Another increasingly popular route is to adopt a UDP based delivery protocol, which applies a send and forget mentality i.e. they don’t wait for the acknowledgment receipt.  This can significantly speed up the delivery process BUT then you have to consider the fact that other features are required, and UDP out of the box won’t work for everyone.

How can you measure the latency on your connection?  Network tools like ping tests and traceroute measure latency by determining the time it takes a given network packet to travel from source to destination and back, the so-called round-trip time. Round-trip time is not the only way to specify latency, but it is the most common.

To test the latency on your Internet connection between 100’s of test servers you can use a tool like Speedtest.net, where you can test your bandwidth and latency against a local (London) server and say one in Bangkok.

On DSL or cable Internet connections, latencies of less than 100 milliseconds (ms) are typical and less than 25 ms desired. Satellite Internet connections, on the other hand, average 500 ms or higher latency.

So if you suffer from latency problems when it comes to file transfer, please feel free to contact Pro2col to discuss.  Alternatively, you could have a look at the fast file transfer section on our website that details some solutions that may help.

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